TotalEnergies and Simply Blue Energy target 3GW floating offshore wind off Oregon

The developers’ joint venture, Deep Blue Pacific Wind, has nominated three sites in the Coos Bay and Brookings areas following a call for information from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). 

Deep Blue Pacific Wind’s three areas nominated are each for approximately 1GW of installed floating wind capacity, said Peter Cogswell, Deep Blue Pacific’s director of government and external affairs.

BOEM’s auction for the Call Areas is expected in the third or fourth of 2023. If Deep Blue Pacific projects are successful, the projects are expected online not before 2030-2031, said Cogswell.  

The projects would be at least 37km off the coast  and in depths of 400-1,300m, he said.

“We want to create clean and renewable energy and we believe that offshore wind is the state’s largest untapped resource… to meet state and regional climate goals,” he said. 

He added: “It’s an outstanding resource out there – there’s just a lot to like about offshore wind.”

TotalEnergies has been entering US offshore wind in a big way over the past few months. In the record-breaking New York Bight auction in early March, the company partnered with Germany’s EnBW on a $795 million win. EnBW has since announced that it was to sell its interest to TotalEnergies. They had teamed up as a company named Attentive Energy.

In May, TotalEnergies was named a winner by BOEM as part of the Carolina Long Bay auction for $160 million. It aims to develop a 1GW offshore wind project. 

Then earlier this year, TotalEnergies announced that it was teaming up with Trident Winds for an offshore wind farm off central California – the 1000MW Castle Wind Offshore (Morro Bay) Castle Wind Offshore (Morro Bay) (1000MW) Offshoreoff Morro Bay, California, USA, North America Click to see full details project. It was previously a partnership of the Germany utility EnBW and Trident. An auction is planned for the region in Q4 2022.

Simply Blue is active in projects off Ireland, the UK and Sweden.